Enterprise management tools are used to manage data centers, and may provide a wide variety of administrative tools and functionality. For example, Oracle Enterprise Manager combines Oracle's system management console, common services, and integrated platform graphical tools. It provides an integrated set of administration applications to help automate and simplify administrator tasks. These supplemental applications focus on specific areas of administration, helping administrators with their daily and routine tasks of keeping services operational.
Management tools have, in the past, enabled administrators to track the state of individual “targets” such as services, hardware, and applications using alerts and other such mechanisms. However, alarms that merely indicate the state of a particular target may not provide enough information about the overall health of a data center or a particular portion of a data center, such as a composite target, which may include a set of member targets working together to act as a system or provide a common service. In addition, compliance standards now define requirements that go beyond individual targets.
As more compliance standards become required, these compliance standards tend to overlap with one another, imposing different requirements on the same data center. In some cases, the same target or member target may have multiple requirements imposed on it by a variety of compliance standards. To further complicate matters, the importance of a particular compliance standard rule to one compliance standard may be different than the importance of the same rule to a different compliance standard. Thus, the traditional mechanisms for managing state information associated with targets in a data center are not well-suited to manage emerging compliance standards, such as those that require a determination as to whether a composite target is in compliance with a particular compliance standard.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.